Grab bag: Pufferfish, TV, good writing

Another reason to like David Owen's Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken:

"`So, Rafe,' Walter says when we're all seated. `Do you want to talk to the Bellyard affair?'

"And that's another thing that gets my goat, Walter's shameless use of corporate speak. I hope he asks me to talk to Rory Stillrock, because I'll reply I can't, the poor bastard's dead."

That's an amusing line with a righteous target. I should add, too, that while crime fiction offers plenty of acerbic protagonists and plenty of introspective protagonists and quite a number of funny protagonists, Pufferfish is among the few who are all three. The Pufferfish novels are: Pig's Head (1994), X and Y (1995), A Second Hand (1995), The Devil Taker (1997), No Weather For a Burial (2010), and the new How the Dead See.

*

In one episode of The Thick of It, a civil servant catches a government minister in a lie, the minister tries to deflect the accusation, and the following exchange ensues:

"Are you inferring that I—"

"Implying."

Misuse of infer for imply has long been a common mistake, and correcting it can get a copy editor in trouble. I loved the exchange.

*

As good as the actors are on The Thick of It, the show has me thinking about writing.

Discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders and on Adrian McKinty's blog, which introduced me to show, has elicited comparisons with celebrated television comedies of recent years, including Seinfeld.

What made Seinfeld the show that it was? Look at the post-Seinfeld television careers of some of that show's principals. Jason Alexander, who played George, and Michael Richards, who played Kramer, each starred in a show shunned by viewers and panned by critics as among the worst ever. Series co-creator Larry David, on the other hand, went on to make the excellent Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Conclusion? Writing matters. Maybe that's why another Seinfeld cast member, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. chose a show with a distinguished writing team behind it for her latest TV series: Veep, created by Armando Iannucci, who also created The Thick of It.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

News flash!!!

Mannion

Pearson

I've singled out Alan Glynn's fine novel Bloodland for recognizing narrative as a contemporary weasel word. So I was especially pleased just now when, 8 minutes, 51 seconds into Series 3, Episode 4 of The Thick of It, the jargon-spouting political spin doctor Stewart Pearson says: "Let's imagine here a narrative—" at which Peter Mannion MP rightly and righteously rolls his eyes and replies: "Oh, goodie." 

Sorry, The Onion and P.G. Wodehouse. Pack it in, S.J. Perelman. We can still be good friends, but I have a new love: The Thick of It.

***

I've just watched the first 3 minutes, 43 seconds of Veep, the new American TV series created by The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci, and that was enough to send me back to The Thick of It. A Wikipedia article on Veep says the show uses "the same cinéma-vérité production style" as the TToI, and all I can say is what was that particular publicist watching?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

I have seen television's future ...

... and it isn't fucking Leave It To Beaver, now is it? Lots of viewers have apparently told BBC America just that, so it will be interesting to see if the cable channel continues its policy of bleeping out swear words from its broadcasts of The Thick of It.

I never watched this British political comedy/drama until Adrian McKinty's blog post yesterday about the bleeping; I've now watched all of Series 1 and a good chunk of Series 3 (in their uncensored versions). McKinty calls the show's invective "some of the best and most creative swearing that we've seen in the English language since Chaucer" and, while he unaccountably omits to mention Shakespeare, his head is in the right place.

The show, a purported look at the inner workings of the British government, is a symphony of swearing, with strings of ingeniously baroque invective from Malcolm Tucker, the brilliant and much-feared government communications director, punctuated by four-letter grace notes from him and the rest of the cast. The swearing is just part of the reason I'm more impressed by The Thick of It than by anything I've seen from Seinfeld, The Wire, The Sopranos or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

But I'm really here to ask for your favorite examples of published or broadcast fictional insult and invective. They need not involve sexual or bodily functions or even dirty words of any kind; one of my favorite invective set pieces in crime fiction is Salvo Montalbano's habit of cursing the saints at moments of tension in Andrea Camilleri's novels. That's up there with Thersites, the "deformed and scurrilous Greek" in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, whose lines include:

"I would thou didst itch from head to foot and I had the scratching of thee; I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece."

Those are my favorite examples; what are yours? And what distinguishes good swearing from tedious, offensive swearing in books, movies, and plays and on television?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012